The Secret of Lost Things. Sheridan Hay

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СКАЧАТЬ anyway. Everything ends eventually. That’s something you should remember, love.”

      She looked absently up the crowded city street, staring past my face and into the distance.

      “Remember, Rosemary,” she said. “Nothing lasts.”

      It was weeks after Mother’s death before I slowed from the manic activity that marked the days following the funeral. A madness held me. I quickly closed Remarkable Hats, sold off the stock or returned it to suppliers for credit against accumulated debt. I was helped and advised by Chaps, and by Mr. Frank (the nine-and-three-quarters.) There was no other decision to be made. It isn’t true that he who dies pays all debts: I couldn’t preserve the store any more than could our life together. Mother and I had depended on a complex web of credit and postponed payments, revealed once she was gone as a great tangle of insolvency.

      I cleaned the flat, the three rooms I’d lived in my entire life. I couldn’t tolerate the space without her; every article reflected her absence. I kept the only photograph I had of her, taken before I was born. After that, she’d always been behind the camera with me as subject.

      Those first days I was a somnambulist, but it wasn’t like living a waking dream, even a nightmare, it was its opposite. My whole life up until her death had been the dream, and this reality—the one without Mother, the one where every object I thought mine was either sold or returned, where every thing familiar to me disappeared—had waited, hidden behind all I loved.

      Suppliers were kind but businesslike. Only the girls at Foys sent a condolence card. I sold off the furniture and the contents of the flat, but after settling accounts, there was little money left. Chaps moved me into her spare bedroom and encouraged me to rest. As my mania subsided, stupor took its place. Chaps urged me to come into her bookstore, where I had worked before, usually stocktaking, during school holidays. Chapman’s Bookshop was cozy, safe; and the small tasks we performed together helped stave off a wave of terrible passivity.

      “No one dies so poor that something isn’t left behind,” Chaps said one afternoon, as we unpacked a box of books together. “You are what your mother left, Rosemary. You’ve got to make good on that legacy. I know you will.”

      Her talks became daily affairs. I just listened.

      “You have to think of your mother’s passing as the way to get out. To escape. You have to begin your life,” Chaps would urge.

      Esther Chapman took very seriously the opportunity to advise me. She’d always been a sort of maiden aunt, and I loved her. But after all I’d taken care of in the past weeks, after what I’d lost, I was languid with grief. Before Mother’s death, I hadn’t any idea of real despair, even while I’d been hurtling toward it for eighteen years.

      Chaps was stoic, and that helped. She’d lost her own mother after a long illness, and lived in her childhood home. Her father—an Anzac, as it happens—had been killed in the Great War. When called a spinster, Chaps would say: “And far better off that way, not that it’s anyone’s business.” She shared a smilar social position to that of Mother (invisibility), and their recognition of this was what had first made them friends. They were oddities, marginal and not exactly respectable. For her part, Chaps was too well read to be considered entirely proper. Books had made her unreasonably independent.

      Judging by photographs in her neat house, with age, Chaps resembled her own mother. Both had pigeon-breasted bodies, small gray heads, large light eyes full of candor. I set my only picture of Mother beside one of Chap’s mother in the living room. The silver frame wasn’t terribly old, but there was something timeless in Mother’s photograph. Black-and-white, it had been taken when she was around eighteen, my age exactly at the time, but taken by whom I would never know. Her youthful face looked out at me vivid with the secrets of her past, her future, and, I fancied, more alive than I was in that same unformed moment.

      At the end of that first month, sick with my own drowsy sorrow, I took the Huon box outside Chaps’s tiny house and sat in the neat square of her garden, bordered with flowers that repeated themselves on three sides. The orange, red, and yellow heads worked against melancholy; their unopened leaves, like little green tongues, reproached me. I picked a few red ones, Mother’s favorite color, and put them on top of the box.

      I knelt down to inspect a large, open leaf, an almost perfect circle. A silver drop of water balanced on its surface, shiny as a ball of mercury. Carefully, I picked the leaf and spun the bead of water inside its green world—a tiny ball of order, isolated and contained. Focusing on the drop relieved an increment of anguish, about the same size, near my heart.

      “Help me,” I prayed to the water drop. “I want Mother. I want it all back. I want my life.”

      Chaps arrived home early from the shop. I heard her fussing with the kettle, making tea in the kitchen. She called through the little house.

      “I’m out here, Chaps!” I replied.

      “Ah, I wondered, dear,” she said, coming outside. “Lovely here in the garden. What are you doing on your knees? You look as if you’re praying to the flowers.”

      “It makes me feel better,” I said, embarrassed. “They look so happy, with their bright faces. They smell like ants, though, these flowers…”

      “Nasturtium is their variety, and I’m sure I don’t know what ants smell like.” She raised her eyebrows. “But I’ve no doubt you do.”

      The tea kettle whistled and she went in briefly to turn it off and brew the tea.

      “I see you have her ashes with you,” she said, coming out with a tray.

      Perhaps she considered a talk about the maudlin nature of my attachment to the Huon box, but let it go. She sat down on a wrought-iron chair, after laying the tray on the matching table.

      “I’ve something to talk with you about,” she said, growing serious.

      “I know what you’re going to say, Chaps.”

      “You only think you know,” she said, pouring out two cups.

      “You’re going to tell me again that ambivalence is fatal,” I said to the leaf.

      She had been saying such things all week.

      “You’ll tell me to give sorrow words. You’re going to say that I must choose, decide, begin to make my way. You’re going to suggest I bury these ashes—”

      “Well, I certainly would say all those things,” Chaps cut in. “And have said all those things, but that’s not what I have to tell you.”

      She sat up straighter, filled with the drama of surprise. She hesitated, then took a deep breath.

      “I bought you a ticket today. An airplane ticket. I want no argument about it—I had the money saved. Guess where you’re going?”

      I stared at her, unable to answer. Did she want me gone? Was she sending me away?

      “Can’t guess,” she said. “I thought it would be easy.”

      I was silent.

      “You love cities, but the only one you’ve ever been to is Sydney. It’s not to there, so don’t consider that one.”

      I couldn’t imagine СКАЧАТЬ